Socioconstructivism has been established as a prominent and intriguing learning theory, and consequently, pedagogical practice. This study focused on the introduction of constructivist pedagogy to secondary social studies pre-service teachers. Students' engagement with each other and the course instructor was a primary concern to mitigate student…

Using a critical inquiry curriculum is about teaching children to read the word and the world. Early childhood teachers apply this theory by helping children question events and texts they interact with in their communities. For example, teachers can help children understand why certain events happened, including whose voices may have been…

We raise concerns about the current state of research and development in formative assessment, specifically to argue that in its concentration on "strategies for the teacher", the literature overlooks the "disciplinary substance" of what teachers and students assess. Our argument requires analysis of specific instances in the literature, and so we…

Content and language integrated learning (CLIL) has received significant interest in recent years as a practical means of creating a plurilingual European community. A key feature of CLIL is the non-native speaking teacher responsible for developing learners' content and language knowledge in a foreign language mediated environment. Teachers often…

This paper examines the continuing "issue" of developing classrooms where talk is used as means of building concepts and understanding. As curriculum guidance increasingly refers to "exploratory talk" and "dialogic talk", it questions why practice seems resistant to change, despite the promotion of social constructivist approaches to learning in…

The primary goal of this project is to provide a summary of extant research regarding humor in the classroom, with an emphasis on identifying and explaining inconsistencies in research findings and offering new directions for future studies in this area. First, the definitions, functions, and main theories of humor are reviewed. Next, the paper…

REDCo findings question the ideal of neutrality of the teacher on ethical, epistemological and didactical grounds showing in particular that the exposure of the teacher's personal commitments and beliefs stimulates students to participate in dialogue. The findings support hermeneutical approaches to the empirical studies in education showing that…

This contribution shows how the author's interpretive approach to religious education was used as a theoretical and pedagogical stimulus and an empirical research tool by researchers in the European Commission Framework 6 REDCo (religion, education, dialogue, conflict) project. The origins and development of the interpretive approach, from its…

This paper is about narrative and identity in classes of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). ESOL students, adult migrants to the English-dominant West, are positioned by policy and by their institutions primarily as potential employees and as test-takers. The paper considers ways in which ESOL students negotiate and perhaps resist the…

This study investigates the complex interplay between national and local objectives of formal education in the bidialectal context of Cyprus. Even though the state and the Ministry of Education and Culture urge teachers to employ the standard language variety in education, the dialect is often used as a medium of interaction and even instruction…

In settings where speakers of two or more different languages coexist, language brokering, the act of interpreting and translating between culturally and linguistically different speakers, is commonly practiced. Yet the examination of language brokering and its implications in classroom settings have not received much attention in the literature.…

Guided by sociocultural theory and the theory of multiliteracies, learning is perceived as a shifting participation in practices, which is mediated by multiple physical and symbolic tools. Drawing on the situated multiliteracies approach, which integrates these two theories, the purpose of this ethnographic research is to examine the participation…

This article seeks to apply the informal learning theory of guided participation to the formal primary L2 classroom. Utilising the concept of guided participation, in which the process of learning is defined as a collaborative interaction between expert and novice leading to a transformation of participation in community activity, the author…

Nearly 10% of American students are identified as "Limited English Proficient" (NCELA 2011). To serve this diverse population of English Language Learners (ELLs), teachers need proven instructional strategies. One prevalent approach is sheltered instruction, defined as "teaching content to English learners in strategic ways that…

This paper presents an extension of an ongoing study of online learning framed within the community of inquiry (CoI) model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001) in which we further examine a new construct labeled as "learning presence." We use learning presence to refer to the iterative processes of forethought and planning,…